Macky Auditorium

A janitor murdered CU Boulder music student Elaura Jeanne Jaquette in Macky Auditorium's west tower on July 9, 1966. Her name still turns up.

The ghost story at Macky Auditorium has a real body behind it, and that body has a name. Elaura Jeanne Jaquette. Twenty years old. A CU Boulder student, singer, and pianist who worked in the admissions office and had been accepted to Oberlin on a music scholarship.

On July 9, 1966, a 37-year-old university janitor named Joseph Dyre Morse attacked her inside the west tower of Macky Auditorium. He raped and beat her to death, then tried to burn her body in the organ recital room where she'd been practicing earlier that morning. The fire was caught quickly. Morse was arrested the same day. He'd been charged with a similar assault in Wyoming five years earlier and had never been added to any state database. He died in prison in 1984.

Elaura is the name most often attached to the haunting, but the accounts don't all match the story you'd expect. She isn't a vengeful presence. Students and ushers report a woman humming in the upper hallways around the west tower, usually melodies that nobody has been able to identify as anything from the current rep. A 2023 piece in the CU Independent described music faculty practicing late and hearing what sounded like a second piano faintly layered under their own playing, always from the direction of the old recital room. The room has been reconfigured since 1966, but the piano door is still in the same spot.

The tower itself has more specific reports. Custodial staff working after hours have described the elevator opening on the fourth floor without being called, doors in the back stairwell opening and closing on their own, and the distinct sensation of somebody watching from the landing above them. One of the regular cleaners refuses to do the tower solo after 11 p.m. and has made that clear on the schedule for years.

Rocky Mountain Paranormal Research Society ran an investigation in 2004 and published a full report online. They captured audio they believed was a woman's voice responding to direct questions, and one of their investigators recorded cold readings in the tower stairwell that didn't track with outside temperature. The society's take was cautious: interesting data, not proof of anything, worth another visit. They haven't reinvestigated.

Macky opened in 1922 after a complicated twenty-year construction process that ran through the deaths of two regents, a World War, and persistent funding problems. Named for Andrew Macky, a Boulder builder who left a bequest to the university, the auditorium has hosted Duke Ellington and most of CU's graduation ceremonies for a century. The west tower, where the murder happened, was originally designed as office space and has been used on and off for administrative work since.

Students who took the CU Ghost Tour in the 1990s and 2000s remember Elaura's name being the first one they heard. The tour was discontinued. The CU Independent runs a version of the story most Halloweens.

The woman humming in the hallway may or may not be Elaura Jeanne Jaquette. What's knowable is that the murder happened, the murderer was caught, and her name is still spoken in Macky Auditorium almost sixty years later by people who weren't alive when she was.